Oxford University Press (OUP) is a department of the University of Oxford, which furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

The Dictionaries Division publishes the flagship online products Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and oxforddictionaries.com, leads innovation in digital lexical publishing and licensing working with the world’s largest technology and information providers, and is launching new initiatives including the Oxford Global Languages programme which will develop digital lexical resources with communities across a wide range of languages.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced hands-on SCRUM Master to manage a cross functional team developing dictionaries content and editing tools according to the overall strategy for the Division. Partnering with internal and external stakeholders, you and the team will create efficient and maintainable solutions within time, quality, and cost constraints, and enjoy the benefit of seeing the real time impact of successful delivery of new tools and content in the Department.

You’ll be an excellent communicator working in multidisciplinary teams with the ability to actively build and sustain key stakeholder relationships, take ownership of project delivery, report on progress, and assess business satisfaction with delivered results. Responsibilities include:

Facilitating a team of in-house editors and offshore developers using SCRUM agile processes: running stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives and demos, and producing the metrics to monitor team performance and ensure rapid delivery and deployment of new features and content.

Managing stakeholder relationships with product owners, senior management, user groups and the business to ensure backlog requirements are gathered and prioritised and development goals communicated.

Proactively working to reduce business risk, investigating and eliminating obstacles and blockers to development progress, ensuring that legal, compliance and information security policies are followed.

Managing supplier relationships to ensure successful delivery of products and services required by the business.

About You

Essential

Industry experience in an agile and/or waterfall project management role on a variety of projects.

A great track-record of successful technical or business process change projects (and a corresponding collection of lessons that you've learnt from them).

Experience and demonstrable success in working effectively and motivating a team, including a long list of improvements that you've been responsible for in the way your current team works.

Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to argue your case and express technological opportunities and technical requirements to both specialists and non-specialists.

Experience in working effectively with external partners and customers.

Desirable

Knowledge of software engineering practices and best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.